Live Blogging

Citizen journalism started when technology started to give people a way to report things for themselves one of the tools that people can use is liveblogging. In 1997 Jorn Barger coined the term “weblog”. A weblog was used to express the different links or websites he found interesting; he would “log” them on his own website. Overtime the term weblog was shortened to blog, and now we have the definition of what a blog is today.

There are different types of blogging websites or platforms that allow users the opportunity to create their own blogs. There are platforms like Blogger, WordPress, Live Journal and more. People create personal accounts, and from there they are able to start “blogging”.

Blogging is done at a personal level. There are many differences between “online writing” and “print writing”. The general rules or ways to blog are a lot more relaxed and flexible for the people to use in any way that they want.

Blogs are created for whatever purpose the user wants. There are blogs on everything imaginable. If a person wants to create a blog about food, then they will create a blog about food. The possible blog topics are endless.

When it coms to writing the blog itself, the users do not have to write the way that journalists for newspapers write. The overall style is more informal or personal. Blogs can be written the way that the individual who made the blog speaks.

Blogs also aren’t organized in a way that has the most important news article or post upfront – this is possible, but that depends on your settings and how your organize your blog. Blogs in general are set up in a reverse chronological order. This means that the most recent blog posts are shown first, and older posts are shown on later pages.

When it comes to writing in general, the writer usually needs sources to back up their information. Live blogging is a new tool that is offered by the internet. With that is he advantage and possibility of having an endless range of sources. The internet gives people access to all types of information from all over the world.

Live blogging also allowed more citizen journalism to happen. There are different blogging tools, not just blogger and wordpress, there are microblogging tools like twitter as well. These sources allow people the report things themselves. So everyone went from being a receiver of information to also having the chance to be a creator or a sender of information too.

People will gain information, they can write about something with that information. People are also able to comment on the things that they see. There is generally a comment section on everything posted on the internet now. People also take up a new distribution role – when they share things on their personal facebook accounts or other social media accounts they are joining the group of distributors around the world.

Print writing, on the other hand, is the complete opposite. It is done with many restrictions. The journalists are more conservative with their writing style. Newspapers in general are also organized in a different way completely. When a news article makes the first page it is because it is the “most important piece of news” and the newspaper gives it the most focus.

Live blogging does give journalists more sources and eyewitness accounts to use when it comes to writing their news. This is where data journalists come in. They are able to gain information from different points of view and then combine all the statistics and tell a final story from multiple view points.